Quick Tip: Up and Running with Drupal 8 in Under Five Minutes

In this quick tip, we’ll be installing a local instance of Drupal 8, beta 1. By the end, you’ll have a copy of Drupal that’s not only ready to be extended with Symfony bundles and other packages, but also ready to accept content and display it to end users.

Step 1: Prepare Environment

In order for everyone to have the same starting point, we’ll be using our trusty old Homestead Improved vagrant box. It’s important to note that even if this tip will be installing Drupal 8 into the Vagrant box, the procedure is absolutely identical for any Ubuntu based environment.

So, somewhat optional, please clone a new Homestead Improved instance as per instructions in this tip. Then, add a new site and make sure you add the entry to your host machine’s hosts file. In my case, it’s test.app and Homestead.yaml looks like this:

Step 2: Download and extract Drupal 8 b1

If you’re using a VM, log into it and enter the folder where you keep your projects. In the case of the Homestead Improved installation above, that’ll be /home/vagrant/Code. If you’re using your own LAMP stack or whatever, just go into your projects folder.

wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-8.0.0-beta1.tar.gz

When downloading finishes, extract the archive and rename the resulting folder to drupal.

tar -xvzf drupal-8.0.0-beta1.tar.gz
mv drupal-8.0.0-beta1 drupal

Step 3: Create the DB

In this case we’ll be using MySQL. We’ll also be using Homestead-specific user/pass defaults. If you’ve got your own environment, adapt as needed. For PostgreSQL see here.

Conclusion

As you can see, adding a new Drupal installation onto your server can be done in minutes from total zero to fully functional CMS. For more information on other aspects and edge cases of Drupal installation, see their installation guide.

Bruno is a coder from Croatia with Master’s Degrees in Computer Science and English Language and Literature. He runs a cryptocurrency business at Bitfalls.com via which he trades crypto and makes blockchain tech approachable to the masses. He’s also an editor for SitePoint, and a developer evangelist for Diffbot.com.